Main news for 5 December 2018

Interesting: why suddenly the author of the epistle to the Hebrew began speaking about angels, asserting that God placed at the head of the creation not the angels, but man? It seemed that it doesn’t come to speak a lot about it, because the rightness of the words of the divine writer becomes clear to everyone, having read at least once the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. But all the same, as seen, there were in the Church certain spiritual tendencies that obliged the author of the message to emphasize the idea that man is not at all lower than the angel. So what is the problem? Most likely, in these spiritualist and gnostic tendencies that began to manifest themselves in the life of the church shortly after the disaster of 70 AD, when apparently was written the epistle.

Formerly, before the disaster, the main problem of the Church and the environment close to the church was apparently the political messianism; now, after the collapse of the messianic revolt and the destruction of the Temple, it became the mystical messianism, connected probably with the messianic representations of certain sectarian and semi-sectarian movements as the Essenes. And for these movements, was character the spiritualization of the image of the Messiah and the Kingdom.

The words of the Savior that His Kingdom "is not of this world", were understood in this environment literally, such that the Kingdom began to be perceived as something transcendent, having no relationship either with our world, or with our reality in general. And concerning the Messiah, there were suppositions that He has never perhaps been a Man, that all His life is something similar to the angelic phenomenon, that His body was ghostly, and thus, ghostly was also the crucifixion, and His very death. And His resurrection was only the revelation of His genuine non human nature and its liberation of this visibility of the human physicality, what in fact He did not have and could not be.

And now the Church had to resist not the political messianism, but this kind of bad mysticism, which from Christianity left only the external form, and still very often thoroughly deformed. And the author of the epistle has again and again to remind that in the center of the earthly world is not a "pure" bodiless angel, but man. And God was embodied not in a "pure" bodiless angel, but in Man. Remind so that the Church does not stop being itself: the body of Christ, filled with the genuine life of a Man who really lived, really died, really resuscitated.